This Entry is Not Linked to Terrorism

As I was wading through my daily RSS feeds this morning, I came upon this gem of a story.

Someone charged Britain's MI5 headquarters with a machete and wounded two guards.

But the part that gave me a few minutes of chuckles is the last sentence of the story, "A police source said it was unlikely the attack was linked to terrorism."

OF COURSE this attack was not linked to terrorism. Do people really think that the same organization that arranged to simultaneously hijack 3 planes in another country across a pretty big ocean from their headquarters and fly them undetected into buildings killing thousands is responsible for some idiot charging the headquarters of British intelligence with a trailblazing implement?

Is this what we've come to? Reporters have to inquire about whether every instance of violence is linked to some centralized enemy? In doing so, they are not only complicit in, but are the very architects of, the powerful threat myth being used to justify our massive military buildup and expansion of domestic police authority. September 11 wasn't originally a myth by any means, but it has been turned into a component of something that most certainly is.

In Britain, this line of thinking is slightly more credible, since they do face some pretty odd attacks related to the whole Ireland thing (as the headline of the next story below the one linked above makes clear, "Extremists crash forklift truck into pub"), and they like to call those attacks "terrorism". But there's some pretty clear and reprehensible equivocation going on in the reporting here.